Mobile Audio Books Club

Fifteen-year-old Francis is a poor farmer’s daughter living in a remote English village. Her fate is sealed one summer day after a smallpox outbreak, which kills her family and leaves her to fend for herself.

And so begins John Cleland’s notorious work of English literature concerning Fanny Hill, the prostitute and woman Francis becomes. Using fiction, Cleland explores the secret lives of prostitutes in a time and world that is long forgotten to modern literature, but remains etched in memory through his words.

The book’s own merits are often overshadowed by its legal history, having been a banned book for the majority of its lifespan. At its heart, Cleland’s complex morality play is about the dialectic of vice and virtue, and the tangled web that is interwoven between. Fanny is a whore (and she is reminded of this by her clients whensoever they want to hurt her feelings) but she is not a whore by choice; rather she is ensnared by an economy of sin and lust, and furthermore by a androcentric society which sees no place for an unattached woman. Fanny nevertheless ends her tale “in the bosom of virtue,” happily married to Charles, with whom several years before she had fallen in love — “He was the universe to me, and all that was not him was nothing to me” — but who had been lost to her for many years due to conditions beyond their control. However, the departure of Charles does not prevent her from going about realizing the joys “of a pleasure merely animal” with other men and then setting herself up as a woman of pleasure. As she nicely puts it while yielding to the advances of a gentleman to whom she is introduced not long after Charles’s disappearance: –

“Had anyone, but a few instants before, told me that I should have ever known any man but Charles, I would have spat in his face, or had I been offered infinitely a greater sum of money than that I saw paid for me, I had spurned the proposal in cold blood. But our virtues and our vices depend too much on our circumstances… I considered myself as so much in his power that I endured his kisses and embraces without affecting struggles or anger; not that they as yet gave me any pleasure, or prevailed over the aversion of my soul to give myself up to any sensation of that sort; what I suffered, I suffered out of a kind of gratitude, and as a matter of course after what had passed.”

Fanny Hill, thusly, is something of a conditional moralist, and this condition soon leads her to become “a kept mistress in form, well lodged, with a very sufficient allowance and lighted up with all the lustre of dress.” And so it goes until she stumbles upon “Mr. H—-” (the only name by which we know him, for Fanny abides the biographical traditions of her day) having his own amorous adventure with the housekeeper. Enraged, she takes vengeance by pairing up with “a very handsome young lad, scarce turned of nineteen, fresh as a rose, well shaped and clever-limbed: in short, a very good excuse for any woman’s liking,” and has a splendid time for which she pays a pretty price: She’s tossed off the payroll and out of the house.

Hardly a rollicking farce (there are times when sex has serious consequences) but at times humorous, never crass nor vulgar, but nonetheless explicit: this bawdy pearl of English literature is worth checking out. Fanny is always honest about herself and what she does to survive, and pulls no punches.

You can buy Fanny Hill at Amazon.com for $18.95

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Filed under: Audio Books on September 21st, 2009